1.371 million renewable energy certificates offered for sale in January

According to reports, as many as 13.71 lakh renewable energy certificates (RECs) were offered for sale at the India Energy Exchange during the trading session of January which was held on January 30. Of these only 1.91 lakh were sold the remaining stacked up with the renewable power producers. The ones sold were at the minimum price of Rs 1,500 per certificate.

A REC is a tradable certificate that represents 1000 units of power generated from renewable sources and sold to the grid. State utilities are to buy these certificates from a power exchange like the Indian Energy Exchange (IEX) or the Power Exchange India, to meet their obligation of sourcing certain amount of power from renewable sources in a year.

These certificates, till now, have a life of one year and if they are not sold at the power exchanges during a year they lapse – meaning the non renewable power generators’ income from sale of power turn out to be marginal.

IEX concluded trade of some 2105 Solar certificates. In this trading session IEX trading volume went up by more than 10 per cent from the previous trading session. For Solar RECs, buy bids of 40,138 RECs and sale bids of 3356 RECs were received against which 2105 RECs were cleared at Rs 12,500/REC.

Total participants in the auction reached all time high of 583 consisting of 271 participants from Discoms, captive consumers & open access consumers on the buy side and 312 eligible entities on the sale side. More than 1300 participants are registered in REC segment at IEX till date. Out of this 475 are eligible entities, 828 are obligated entities and 7 have been registered as voluntary entities.